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Rachel Pollard and Julie Lloyd, 2018. Cognitive Analytic Therapy and the Politics of Mental Health 2018. Reformulation, Winter, p.40.
We are pleased to introduce the following title:
Cognitive Analytic Therapy and the Politics of Mental Health (Pollard and Lloyd) 2018.
To paraphrase John Donne, ‘No therapist is an island’. This book explores how the work of psychological therapists is embedded in the political, social and cultural context in which therapists and clients live and work. Regardless of the claims made by some therapies for a ‘scientific’ or evidence base, researchers cannot fully measure the complexity of the context in which therapy is practised and its effects on individual subjective intra-psychic and interpersonal experience, including the therapeutic relationship. Through a relational understanding, this book explores the influences of a wider political context on how therapy is delivered.
Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT) began in the early 1980s as a way of combining the insights of psychoanalysis with some of the techniques of cognitive therapy to provide an accessible relatively brief therapy in the NHS in the context of limited resources and high demand in adult mental health services. CAT has since been developed and adapted for use as a therapy in specialized services including forensic, child and adolescent, eating disorders, older adult, and learning disabilities services. This book appraises how the theory and practice of CAT has developed in interaction with the rapidly changing political and social environment.
From the beginning CAT therapists have paid particular attention to the social and economic antecedents of mental distress which has led to tensions and conflict in the relatively conservative institutional contexts within which many work. The chapters in this book discuss how these conflicts can both be understood and managed from various CAT perspectives with an explicit acknowledgement of how politics affects mental health and frames psychological work. Contributions by 18 authors working in diverse services including adult mental health, learning disabilities, child and adolescent, as well as private practice, in the UK and in Italy seek to illuminate how the political context affects the way in which psychological therapists formulate their work as well as constraining or facilitating their practice in the services and communities in which they work.
If you want to know more use the link below. https://www.routledge.com/Cognitive-Analytic-Therapy-and-the-Politics-of-Mental-Health/Pollard-Lloyd/p/book/9781138305144